www.sausagemaking.org

I like to grow my own fruit, and I have a few apple trees with several grafted varieties. In case you are interested, the varieties I have include Peasgood nonesuch, court pendu plat, Blenheim orange, granny smith, Merton russet, lawfam, primrouge, bittenfelder and glockenapfel.

I have a bench-top fruit juice extractor, and this is fine for making apple juice. However the machine is noisy, and it takes quite a while to process a bucket or two of apples.

On the 'net I've seen pictures of home-made presses and grinders and it strikes me that it would not be impossible for me to make this equipment. But before I tackle any project like this, I'd appreciate hearing from anybody who has had experience with simple/cheap cider-making gear.

All comments on the subject are welcome. I'd like to learn from your mistakes and successes. Many thanks..... Coote.

it might be worth a:

Visit Spuddy's Home Brewing Forum
http://www.lartigiano.co.uk/Homebrewing/

Thanks Jpj....that looks like a promising site. I'll have a look at it when I get a decent slice of time allocated to me on the 'puter.

I've used a Pulpmaster, which is about as simple as it gets. It's a bucket with a lid, and the pulping is done with a very simple propeller type device fitted to an electric drill, it's really just a slightly twisted piece of rectangular steel (approx 20cm x 3cm x 3mm) welded to a ~8mm steel rod.
I guess it depends on the volumes you wish to pulp, but to give you an idea using this, I made 56 pints of juice in about 2 hours (including pressing time). I think they cosy about 15 quid over in the UK.
Cheers

Try here .... http://www.ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php ... ider_Press

They also have an apple pulper here .... http://www.ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php ... e_Scratter

The pulper looks a bit dangerous

There are a couple of commercial bits here .... http://www.ascott.biz/acatalog/Fruit_Pr ... _Brew.html

The fruit crusher / pulper makes me think of a garden shredder

G

I have seen video of pulping with a garden shredder, but I would be concerned about electric shock myself

Dave

Thanks for all the encouraging ideas and links. It looks like it should be possible to get some decent juice production this season without having to use my tiny juice extractor.

Lee... thanks for pointing me to the 'Pulpmaster'. I did a Google search and found plenty of information. A device like this would be heaps quicker to make than the other grinders I've seen. Perhaps I might even be able to find a local source for the ready-made Pulpmaster itself.

I anticipate that my first apples, a variety called primrouge, could be ready for juicing in March.

Would it be possible to quarter the apples and put them through a meat grinder a couple of times?

A freind of mine was complaining about all th apples he throws away each year so we decided that next year we're gonna make some cider up. I was planning to mince thhe apples but hadn't got as far as the press. I think he said one of hise friends may have one, but if not then we'll need to improvise. I was thinking net curtain materials in big containers and twisting small batches to remove the juice from the pulp.

Rgds,
FB

I use a hand-powered meat grinder and my immediate impression is that apples could be ground this way, but it would be slow. However if you had an electric grinder then maybe things would be a bit quicker. Maybe a food processor would be faster still.

My grinder, I think, would have difficulty in 'grabbing' the bits of apple to feed them along the worm to the blades.

My electric fruit juice extractor works well, but it is relatively slow to use and I feel that maybe I'm overworking it a bit with the large quantity of juice I'm making.